Open Text Corp. is outsourcing its hiring practice in a move that’s touted to save the software firm 20 per cent in costs and free up staff for other HR work.

Richmond Hill, Ont.-based Open Text began in September to farm

out its recruitment process to Ceridian, a human resources firm in Markham, Ont.

Once a manager decides to hire staff, Ceridian takes care of “”sourcing the candidates, screening them, interviewing them,”” and delivering to Open Text a signed contract, said Dominic Scaffidi, Open Text HR director for the Americas.

Open Text decided to take this route because it wanted to work with its managers more strategically on “”important issues that they would have from a people perspective,”” Scaffidi said.

Illustrating this, he said, if the sales arm of a business was keen to cover customers by industry instead of geographically, a freed-up HR department can help determine a “”human-capital agenda or strategy”” that will make the new business direction a success, he explained.

For example, he questioned, would the sales team need a different skill set to cover industries instead of countries?

Scaffidi said that with recruiting, one has to know where to advertise, source potential candidates, look through resumés and interview people. “”We decided that we were never going to be able to get really, really good at that whole side of it. And it would take a lot of resources and investment. “”

Scaffidi said adopting this approach has permitted Open Text to hire more staff — at least double its usual run rate — and expects the trend to continue for the “”next little while, at least.””

Open Text saved costs by using Ceridian’s applicant-tracking system, rather than buying its own, and letting Ceridian “”buy a lot more (job) postings than we could at a much better price.””

Moreover, it knew Ceridian can use recruiters more effectively. Open Text explained it typically ran into one of two problems: being unable to keep recruiters busy or giving them too much work.

Ceridian, which said Open Text was the first client to use this service in Canada, said it saw a “”gap”” in the market to provide these kinds of services. Now it’s “”talking to lots of potential customers,”” primarily Canadian, but will eventually gauge U.S. interest, said Tom Gardner, director of Ceridian’s corporate development department.

Because Ceridian has only begun offering this service, Gardner said it’s unclear what the average cost savings will be for a company, but suspects it will be considerable.

“”We think there are an awful lot of companies out there that we will save 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent, even 50 per cent on their fully-loaded recruitment cost, because a lot of companies do recruitment fantastically inefficiently.””

According to Gartner Dataquest, after payroll and benefits outsourcing, recruitment is one of the most most outsourced processes with a market projected to grow to U.S.$8.3 billion by next year.